


Spare Room

by vissy



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Gen, family ficathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-08-01
Updated: 2004-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-02 03:10:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vissy/pseuds/vissy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for <a href="http://zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com/">zvi</a>’s Family Ficathon.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Spare Room

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [zvi](http://zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com/)’s Family Ficathon.

At the end of seventh year, Harry spends three miserable days at number four, Privet Drive, before he remembers he doesn’t have to anymore. The remembering doesn’t make him any less miserable, but it does make him pick up the telephone and call Hermione. He doesn’t need to ask if he can come stay with her; she just tsks at him as if he should’ve thought of it in the first place.

The Grangers’ house seems strangely similar to the one on Privet Drive, except that there are pictures of Hermione everywhere instead of Dudley. Harry likes it. It is a quieter household than he is accustomed to; he can imagine Hermione bossing her cheerful, willing parents into submission from the moment she was born. They watch her with loving and careful eyes, and he sees the way their hands reach out towards her and then pull back before she notices. He can tell how much they love her, how much she puzzles them, how much they want to know her. He wonders if a Muggle can really know a witch, and he thinks about his mother.

They put him and Hedwig in their spare room; it is small and square and plain, with polished floorboards that squeak beneath his feet and a divan bed that’s shorter than he is. On the chest of drawers, he finds a photo of the whole family. They are posing near the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens; Harry has never been there, but he has read about it. Hermione is a toddler in her dad’s arms; she is grinning like a little lunatic and straining for something out of view, while her mum holds an enormous pregnant belly between her splayed fingers and laughs forever.

Harry toes off his trainers, crawls into bed and sleeps for a long time.

***

When he wakes the next morning, he can’t think where he is. Sunlight is streaming through the window, and his eyes find the family portrait through a hazy, restless curtain of dust. He thinks he sees Hermione move for just a moment, her baby magic animating the muggle flatness, but he blinks and she is still. He thinks: she never got to be a big sister.

Harry is not so miserable in this quiet company, but once he sits up his head unravels and sickens. He touches his brow with tentative fingers, but the scar tissue remains dormant; it is his jaw that is swollen and sweltering. He stumbles down the stairs and follows the scent of bacon and eggs and burnt toast to the kitchen, where he finds Mrs Granger at one end of the table with her nose in _The Times_ and Hermione opposite, similarly absorbed in _The Wizarding Way of Death_; the familial symmetry creates a sort of inkblot illusion, and Harry sees the space between them first, and then, with difficulty, their faces. Mr Granger is stooped over a frying pan, his bed hair even crazier than Harry’s, and Harry thinks (_that’s my job_) that he might throw up.

They all look up at the same time and smile at him, then frown when they see his face. He tries to wish them a good morning, but can barely open his mouth. Mr and Mrs Granger stare at him hard, then nod at each other, saying as one, “Wisdom tooth.”

Harry senses their relief. This is something they know how to deal with.

***

He rinses his mouth out with warm salty water, trying not to gag on the taste of brine, and is tucked back under the covers with a pot of peppermint tea. Hermione perches at the foot of his bed with Crookshanks nestled on her lap and watches her parents fuss over him. They mutter with quiet enthusiasm about antibiotics and pericoronitis and x-rays, and debate whether his wisdom teeth should come out. Mrs Granger cites research showing that routine removal of disease-free third molars could not be justified, but Mr Granger says that there are less chances of post-operative complications while Harry is still young. Mrs Granger raises the dread bogey of dry socket, while Mr Granger reminisces about practising dentistry in Sierra Leone when he was a young man. (”Some of my patients thought they’d go barking mad if a wisdom tooth was removed. Goodness, what a long time ago that was. Before you were born, Hermione love.”)

They ramble on for ages, and seem to agree on just one thing: dentistry and magic do not mix. For the first time, Harry sees Mr Granger looking at Hermione with something like reproach, and she keeps her mouth closed. Harry wonders how much it hurts the Grangers to watch their daughter move in such a different world to their own. Harry waits for Hermione to suggest a visit to St Mungo’s but understands when she is silent. Her parents are in their element, and she will not spoil it by reminding them that it is unnecessary. It has taken Harry and Hermione a long time to learn tact, but it comes more naturally nowadays.

***

They are alone now, and Harry says, “I’d really rather not have anything ripped out.” He is not scared, precisely, but the thought of it - a gap to worry at - makes his skin crawl.

“Don’t worry,” says Hermione. “Dad’s all ‘hooray for surgery’, but Mum doesn’t believe in removing teeth unless she has to, and she’ll carry the day. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. I can shrink your teeth for you once the infection’s better. I know how.”

Harry hears something of the old Hermione in this (_she’s a nightmare, honestly_) and is glad of it. “Do you think it drives them mental knowing they’re, well, _obsolete _to you?”

Hermione bites her lip and shrugs. “It makes me lonely if I think about it too hard.” Her eyes catch on the photograph, and then glance off it towards the window. “I don’t think any family ever fits quite right. Look, they want to help. And the wanting’s enough for me.”

“It’s enough for me too,” says Harry quietly. He remembers the first lesson they were taught at Hogwarts: your house will be something like your family. He thinks Hermione heard more: there will be a test.

When her eyes return to him, she is crying and smiling and clutching at her chest as if it is caving in. “Dry socket,” she gasps with a weird grin, and he reaches for her, wanting her hand.

She gives it to him, a warm, wet press of palm, and a tremor rises in his own chest as he says, “He was my brother too.”


End file.
